Russell Banks - The Darling

Sam and I remained silent for a long moment. Finally, I said, “Where… how did you get this?”

“Friends in high places,” he said and popped the video from the VCR and slid it into his jacket pocket. He refilled his glass and then mine, leisurely, as if we had all the time in the world. “No, it’s a bootleg copy. Half the foreign journalists in West Africa have seen it by now.” He sat down on the sofa and stretched his long legs out and crossed them at the ankles the way Zack used to. “Hannah, we’re shutting down the embassy tomorrow. I’m leaving the country tonight, and you are, too.”

“I can’t.”

“You haven’t much of a choice. It’s simple suicide for you to stay here now. In a week, Monrovia, the whole country, will belong to Taylor. And he’ll come after you, Hannah. Believe me.”

“Charles? I’m in no danger from Charles,” I said. “Since we’re both truth-telling, Sam, I’ll tell you this: I helped Charles. In the States. I was the one who helped him break out of jail.”

He smiled, cold and knowing. “I’m well aware of that.”

“You are?” I said, and then suddenly all the lights went out. “Shit! That’s the end of the fuel for the generator, I guess.” I couldn’t see a thing, as if I were blindfolded. I started to get up and search in the dark for a candle or kerosene lantern, but my body wouldn’t obey, as if my arms and legs were bound. Into the darkness I said, “Oh, Sam, what is going on? What do you mean, you’re well aware that I helped Charles escape?”

His voice came out of the darkness. “Back then, the last place we wanted Charles Taylor was in a cell in Massachusetts. We wanted him here in Liberia. Our man in Africa.”

“ ‘We’?”

“We didn’t quite count on Prince Johnson showing up at the party, of course. But we more or less got what we wanted. At least Doe’s out of the picture. But Charles Taylor ain’t your friend, Hannah.”

“I don’t understand.” The rain had let up, and in the sudden silence our voices seemed amplified, as if we were miked. I heard Sam loudly sigh. I said, “What are you telling me? That you somehow arranged Charles’s escape from prison? That’s impossible. No one knew I was there. No one out here knew, certainly.”

“Some of it was dumb luck, I admit. We were going to use your friend, Zack, who wasn’t all that steady a hand. But then you turned up, and ol’ Zack was happy to step aside, long as he thought he’d still get him a sizeable payday out of it.”

“And I suppose he did.”

“Yeah, eventually. We all got what we wanted out of it. Zack wanted a big payday, and you wanted to help Charles turn Liberia into a socialist democracy, which he might yet do, but don’t count on it. And we wanted Charles to get rid of Samuel Doe. We just didn’t get what we wanted in the form we’d imagined or planned. But that’s history. Zack’s happily back in business in Accra, buying and selling artworks, nicely protected and properly licensed. The man must be a millionaire ten times over by now. And I expect Charles will be an improvement on Doe. He’s a whole lot smarter than Doe and nowhere near as crazy, but he ain’t Nelson Mandela. Hell, even Nelson Mandela’s no Nelson Mandela.”

“I was working for you, then. The Americans. The CIA.”

“Let’s just say you were a protected asset. Still are. Which is why, Miz Sundiata, it’s time to get your ass out of Africa. You know too much for Charles to let you stay here alive.”

“Such as?”

“Such as how he got out of an American prison. First thing he’ll do when he takes Monrovia is send some of his nastier boys over here to Duport Road looking for you. Then he’s going after Prince Johnson and everyone else in that video. He’s probably got his own copy and watches it every night, making his hit list. Charles definitely did not want Doe dead. He wanted a televised show trial that would establish his own legitimacy and right to run the country.”

I heard Sam get up and grope his way from the room out to the terrace, where he called to the Marines and asked for a flashlight. A moment later he returned with the circle of light dancing in front of him. “C’mon, girlfriend, pack your bag. We got us a helicopter waiting out there on the basketball court at the embassy. You’ll be home in Emerson, Massachusetts, by tomorrow night,” he said. “I assume that’s where you’ll want to go.”

Home? Whose home? Not Hannah Musgrave’s. And not Dawn Carrington’s. And not Mrs. Woodrow Sundiata’s home. All the women I have been disappeared from the planet that night. “I don’t want to go to jail, Sam,” I said. “If I go back, I stand a good chance of being arrested. I’m still a fugitive, Sam.”

“You won’t be arrested. You still got that old fake passport, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It’ll do. You haven’t been underground anyhow. Not for a long time. We got those old Chicago bail-jumping charges against you dropped before you went back in eighty-three. You’ve been clean as a whistle for years, Hannah. Practically a virgin.”

“Sam, I hate this.”

“Yeah, well, that’s about the size of it, Hannah.” He took both my hands in his and pulled me to my feet. “C’mon. It’s time to turn this war and this damned country over to the Africans again.”

“As soon as the war is over, I’m coming back. This is my home, Sam.”

“Maybe so, darlin’, but I’ve got a feeling that by the time this war’s truly over you’re going to be an old lady.”

S AM’S DOUR PREDICTION was not far off. More than a decade passed before I felt able to return and face the aftermath of that last night in Monrovia, and I was fifty-eight by then. Not an old lady, exactly, not by today’s standards, but pretty much gone in the face and body. Most people in the village view me as old and sexually irrelevant, and here at the farm even Frieda and Nan and Cat and Anthea, though they work alongside me day in and out, treat me as an old lady, which is to say, they treat me as if I were of a slightly different species than they, and there is a certain amount of truth in that. I’m a husk of what I was twelve years ago. As we age we become a different animal. Women, especially. And when we’ve become an animal that’s no longer sexually viable, the young, because they think they’ll never be old themselves, treat us as if we’re another kind of primate than they. As if one of us were a chimpanzee and the other human.

Because of my age, I have many notable incapacities and limitations that the girls don’t have, and they know it and show it, for they are as competitive with one another and me as men are with men. For example, I can’t lift as much as they. Cat, so delicate and precise in her movements, can lug more firewood and can load a truck with apples faster than I. And I have less stamina than they. Frieda and Nan are athletes and, regardless of their seasonal debauches, can work all day behind a rototiller in rocky Adirondack soil and have enough energy to drink and dance till closing time at one of the local roadhouses and then go home with a college boy working summers as a waiter at the Ausable Club and screw him blue till sunrise and still show up at the farm at seven ready for work. Anthea, after a lifetime of hard physical labor, has a strong man’s upper-body strength. Though she’s in her early forties, she can climb a ladder with a fifty-pound bundle of shingles on her shoulder, shear a dozen sheep without a break, and dig post holes from dawn to dusk without complaint, except of boredom. I can’t do any of that. Nor can I attract the erotic gaze of a man or woman anymore. Only low curiosity comes my way now.